Melissa Perri

@lissijean · Founder, ProdUX Labs & Product Institute

@bentossell Ooh there are tons! One of the biggest ones though is that the Product Manager is the sole person responsible for coming up with all the ideas on what to build. This is a problem on both sides - for companies and individuals. Many people get into this role thinking they'll be like the "Steve Jobs" person of the company who will get to put all their bright ideas in action. In reality, many times lower level Product Managers do not have much of a say in what they get to build (I think this is wrong btw) and most of the job is spent getting buy in from Stakeholders or writing requirements. On the flip side, many companies really do not understand what Product Management so they put us in roles that are more project management related (organizing meetings, figuring out when things will be shipped, writing requirements for developers). Then the product suffers because no one is managing it holistically, and instead running around to react to whatever management is throwing at them. Another one too that no one expects getting into this role is how much of it is trying to persuade people. I'd say 60-80% of the job everyday is trying to convince people that what you are doing is the right thing to do. It's fielding a crazy number of requests from people all around the company, saying no a lot, trying to understand people's behaviors so you can communicate with them. So much people management and soft skills go into this role.

5 share tweet・3 months ago

Jake Crump

@jakecrump · Community Team with Product Hunt

How does someone just starting out, get into Product Management?

@lissijean · Founder, ProdUX Labs & Product Institute

@jakecrump Try to get your hands dirty. Build something yourself - whether it's a side project or something to help out a friend. Make a portfolio out of the steps you did to build it and use that to find a job at a bigger company. It's pretty hard to break into product management these days without a background in it, but I find people who demonstrate they can think critically about products and try their hands at it have an easier time.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc · Code @ Product Hunt

Also - would love to know what your day-to-day is like on balancing being a founder & writing a book. Are you writing everyday, weekends only? I imagine is really tough!

@lissijean · Founder, ProdUX Labs & Product Institute

@mscccc Haha. Oh... my day. My days are kind of crazy and never the same. Honestly our school productinstitute.com has taken up most of my time as well as the consulting I do, so I squeeze in writing here and there. Long plane rides are awesome for it. I just restructured the book on my last flight to California, so it's going a bit better now. I also like working on weekends if I have nothing else to do. I would always prioritize spending weekends with friends and family but if I have nothing going on during a Sunday afternoon, I'll sit down for a few hours and write. I found that accountability is key here. Two of my colleagues and myself are in a book club and we share what we are writing with each other every Tuesday. Knowing that I have to have something ready for them is keeping me on track.

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Ayrton De Craene

@ayrton · Code @ Product Hunt

What has most surprised you about starting your business? Also what has been the biggest challenge to overcome and how did you do it?

@lissijean · Founder, ProdUX Labs & Product Institute

@ayrton I think the biggest surprise was that I started a business. I started Produx Labs when I came home from a startup accelerator in Italy. Honestly, I was trying to find another startup to work for but I had such a crazy break up with my founders I wasn't ready to jump into anything else yet. I threw up a quick website that showed the workshops I did and the services I offered - UX design & Product Management consulting. People started calling me because of the speaking I was doing. That shocked me more than anything. At the beginning, everyone wanted UX help but not much product help. I did a lot of UX design work then, but also lots of workshops and teaching for the public. I kept seeing the product management piece was super broken though in many of the companies I worked for, but no one cared. That was a very frustrating time for me because I wasn't doing exactly what I wanted to. Now, it has shifted as more companies are moving to Agile. They realize the Product Management piece is broken. So business took off and then I had the problem that I had to be everywhere at once. This was our biggest challenge. I was flying to 12 different countries as a year and on the road about 1/3 of the time (and this is not business class travel, this is like cheap travel in economy class, living out of cheap AirBnBs to make the company profitable). I was getting sick a lot and very tired. So I thought about how I could start building something that did not require me to be in person all the time - that's where the school came from. I took all the classes I repeated everywhere and turned it into an offering where I did not have to be in person. Now I still travel but I can be a bit more selective and not spend months away from home (Tokyo next!)

Mahadev Majaladar

@realmahadev · I'm Digital Marketer. Made dmbundle.com

How do I explain product specification to Remote Team in well manner?

@lissijean · Founder, ProdUX Labs & Product Institute

@realmahadev I think it's important to share a common understanding about what you are working on with remote teams. My best team I ever worked on consisted of me in NYC and my developers in Nashville. We used JIRA to create tasks, but we got together very often to talk through our work. They showed it to me early before they were done to make sure they were on the right track. We'd fix things on the fly if not. At the beginning though, I put all the specifications in large documents that were like 40 pages long. No one read them. Actually, they laughed at me when I asked if they read them. So as we became more Agile, we ditched the documents, had more discussions about the work, and then wrote down just enough to remind ourselves. We also started sharing more pictures and diagrams. We never had a problem after that. I find that real time communication is really everything when it comes to remote teams.

Mahadev Majaladar

@realmahadev · I'm Digital Marketer. Made dmbundle.com

Thanks @lissijean

COSTAS ANDRIOPOULOS

@candriopoulos · https://medium.com/strictly-curious

Dear Melissa, Which are the websites that you most frequently visit fro product management issues? Thank you.

@lissijean · Founder, ProdUX Labs & Product Institute

I follow people more than I follow websites. David Bland, Teresa Torres, Jeff Patton, Ellen Chisa, Barry O'Reilly, Des Traynor, Laura Klein, Cindy Alvarez, Ken Norton, and Jeff Gothelf are some of my favorites. They have great articles online.

5 share tweet・3 months ago

COSTAS ANDRIOPOULOS

@candriopoulos · https://medium.com/strictly-curious

@lissijean Thank you Melissa for your insightful answer.

Vinit Agrawal

@vinit_agrawal1 · Co-Founder at Tars

Hi Melissa, I think one of the biggest problems i face on a daily basis is to prioritize the tasks involved while building and maintaining a large software product. Which also has a primary Front-end part. And we all come up with our own task prioritization framework, either explicit or implicit. I am curious to know, if you have any suggestions on how to make this task prioritization framework a bit more concrete and explicit and which takes into account the business data.

@lissijean · Founder, ProdUX Labs & Product Institute

@vinit_agrawal1 prioritizing tasks is always tricky with product management. I would really look into Cost of Delay, which I have found to be really useful for prioritization. Joshua Arnold and Ozlem Yuce have great resources on it at blackswanfarming.com. There is also the CD3 model which takes Cost of Delay and makes it into a prioritization framework.

Mahadev Majaladar

@realmahadev · I'm Digital Marketer. Made dmbundle.com

Should I focus on only one core product feature or multiple? E.g. Hotjar provides heatmap, form analysis, conversion funnels which are fine because these features are related to each other. But it is also offering features like feedback polls, survey, recruiting user testers which are I think completely different than it's previous analytics features.

@lissijean · Founder, ProdUX Labs & Product Institute

@realmahadev I think it's about what your goals are for the company. I can't say why Hotjar made the decision to go into that, but they might have to break into new markets. I would focus on making your core product awesome - do everything you can to make it optimized and successful. Then turn your attention to other products that might work well with your strategy.

Chad Whitaker

@chadwhitaker · Design at Product Hunt

Hi Melissa! Do you advocate doing heavy user research and user interviews around an image prototype before building? Or do you prefer the idea of building a solid MVP and collecting larger amounts of feedback with a potentially larger pool of actual users?

@lissijean · Founder, ProdUX Labs & Product Institute

@chadwhitaker I think prototypes only can test so much, so while I think they are great tools, they have to be used to answer the right questions. Prototypes can answer questions like "is this intuitive", "are all the necessary items there", "can the user achieve the goal in this user flow". They cannot answer questions like "Do my users have this problem?" and "Does this solution produce the desired outcome for my user and solve their problem?" or "How delightful is this solution for my user?" They really need to interact with it to answer those questions. If you're answering those questions, I would say you need to experiment more and get something into the hands of users to try.